I know it’s tough, and stuff like this would invariably come down to judgement. Which is why I wouldn’t actually penalize anyone - again, more like a refereeing situation. If a boxer clutches another one, he doesn’t lose the fight, but the referee steps in to separate them and get the fight back on track. No harm, no foul, but back into your corners, boys.
But hell, I suspect there may be a natural fix - as the war recedes, the tone around here will probably improve all on its own. I think it already has.
Except for that lemon over there. Bloody splitter.
You’re right! There was something I agreed with! Thanks, Squink. For a minute there I thought I was going to have to give back my secret neocon decoder ring.
Holy cow, Tom. If that’s the standard, why are you tolerating the Blessed Mother Teresa thread? In it, the anti-religion rants of Michael Moore and Mother Teresa critic-slash-windbag Christopher Hutchens are being presented as fact. But Hutchens was so far off-base that Mother Teresa’s harshest critic, Aroup Chatterjee, disclaimed any association with him, and called his documentary, Hell’s Angel, sensationalist.
Well, how about the “good manners” used to call people of faith “delusional” and “superstitious”? We’re evil too because we consider the eternal man as spirit to be a more urgent matter than the temporal man as body. Is it because tolerating mockery and insults against the faithful is safe here? After all, racial and ethnic slurs are forbidden, but you can damn sure slur people who’s experience has compelled them to hold certain religious beliefs.
I totally agree. It’s extremely annoying when this happens (on either side of any issue). Behavior like the above stiffles reasoned debate and should not be allowed in GD.
How about this rule: No pile-ons
Yes, it sounds general, but we do have another, famous, general rule: Don’t be a jerk.
If we can have the latter, why not the former? It’s a judgement call when someone is being a jerk and, similarly, it’s a judgement call when a pile-on is occuring.
Also, I found this on another message board, and it sounded like a good idea
Can something similar be applied to GD?
This kind of rule would benefit GD the most, and raise the quality of debates, which are the entire reason for having GD. It seems that people who go to the Pit do so at their own risk, so I don’t see that much need for it in the Pit.
Perhaps because the mouth foamers in that thread are in that thread (not submitting thread after thread with the same faults) and because there has been no evidence that any poster there has distorted or falsified their evidence? In my post from which you quoted, I expressed my personal opinion that, for the reasons I gave, december was not the “good poster” that some others thought he was. However, december did not get banned for his constant errors or rabble rousing; he got banned for specifically and deliberately twisting and falsifying information.
The general rule about bad information on this board has always been a demand for documentation and a rebuttal with better information. There have been exactly three defenses of Mother Teresa posted that actually cited information (and that is if I generously include your note that the Wikipedia article is self-identified as controversial).
If Hutchens has lied, let’s see the evidence of his lies (or even of Chatterjee’s disclaimer). If any poster has deliberately provided false claims, report them.
Clinton was a far-left liberal from the word go. However, to give the devil his due, he was a savvy enough politician to realize that he had to appear more moderate, so he paid enough lip service to enough things to make himself more palatable.
But just as an example on one point you listed, he was strongly anti-military. The military itself noted it (example ) as did others:
And as far as welfare reform went, he talked big in 92 and didn’t do a damn thing afterwards until 96 when the Republican Congress held his feet in the fire.
Getting lumped in with Bricker - and you - is a compliment, not a dig. OK, rjung is too stupid to realize it, and I grant you that a compliment from a mouth-breather like him is as meaningless as an insult, but I’m trying the DNFTTwit route for a while.
Plus I fixed my Internet access problem, so I want to go read the interesting posts.
Wow. Given how many Democrats get elected to office, is it your contention that 40-50% of Americans are far-left ideologues?
Wacky fun!
On the one hand, I can see the rule against pile-ons being tempting. On the other hand, there are plenty of occasions where an otherwise interesting thread gets hijacked by a single person who loves to come in and stir up trouble either by saying something outrageous or by trying to turn the discussion toward whatever their one favored topic is. I find that extremely annoying, and I find that sometimes the discussion can get back on track if someone points out this behavior and says, “Folks, can we dismiss the outrageous statement instead of showing how eloquently we can destroy an easily-destroyed comment?”
Making such a statement has the appearance of a pile-on, but it can lead to more productive conversations, I think.
Let’s compare Clinton’s spending on the military with that of the rest of the world.
Military Spending 2001 GDP 2000 Military Share of GDP 2001/2000
Military GDP
Spending 2000
2001 share
US 396.1 9810 4.0%
Germany 21 1866 1.1%
Japan 40.4 4765 0.8%
UK 34 1427 2.4%
France 25.3 1294 2.0%
Costa Rica 0 31.9 0.0% (GDP: PPP)
Canada 7.7 701 1.1%
Russia 60 1200 5.0% (GDP: PPP)
Iceland 0 9 0. 0%
Spain 6.9 561 1.2%
Finland 121 2.0%
The US spent roughly twice the share of GDP on the military as did Europe. As for Russia, total spending is not remotely in the same league. I can only conclude from the above that, internationally, Clinton was extremely pro-military.
On what basis are you accusing rjung of trolling? And how does that particular claim fit in with your side’s shrill and repeated calls for “tighter moderation.”
There seems to be a corollary to Gaudere’s Law. A person who loudly complains about another person’s conduct on the board either has been or will be at least as guilty of it himself within two days either way, if not in the same thread or even the same post.
----- According to retired Col. David Hackworth: “It would have a hard time blasting into an old women’s retirement home.”
… and yet Bush was able to use Clinton’s military quite ably in Afghanistan.
Thank you President Clinton.
I commend Clinton for his foresight in investing in new technologies such as the Predator aircraft and improved battlefield command and control. There will always be armchair strategists intent on finding the last Cold War. It takes leadership to identify the true threats to America’s health and security: terrorism, fiscal irresponsibility and pandering to the highest-paying lobbyists.
That’s an astoundingly selective memory you’ve got there, Sam. In point of fact, conservatives didn’t start making themselves scarce on these boards until quite some time after the invasion of Iraq had been launched, and it began to become apparent there weren’t any “WMDs” after all.
And let us not forget that, by any reasonable standard of measurement, Collounsbury was himself a conservative.
It astounds me still that you, and many others on the right here, continue to harp upon this situation as if you alone were the innocent victims of us “vicious liberals.” Once long ago I even started a thread about this topic, you may remember, in which I listed just a few examples of hateful bile spewed out by proponents of the war in GD. Believe me, the Right dished it out fast and thick back then, and gave as good as it got, if not better.
I’d like to see you produce 5 substantive posts by december to back up this claim. Certainly by the time I began participating on this message board, if not long before, december contributed virtually nothing of value to GD: on the contrary, his modus operandi seemed to be that of purposefully posting reams right-wing propaganda, forcing more intelligent posters to waste hours refuting his unsubstantiated accusations.
On the contrary, one december was more detrimental to GD than a handful of Collounsburys.
Collounsbury was kept on because he was an acknowledged expert on the Middle East – far more knowledgeable than you, Sam – who added a very great deal of substance to this forum despite his raucous manner. It is in my opinion a major weakness of the rules that idiots who play by them abide forever, while intelligent folks who can’t get the boot, sooner or later.
Still, I don’t see a way around that problem, and am willing to accept that we live in an imperfect world (and post on an imperfect message board).
Clinton was never hostile to the military. He was the first president in a number of years to rein in some of their spending, but he was also the president who presided over the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It would have been irresponsible for him to have continued to maintain a miltary as large as the one we had kept during the Cold War. (Remember the much touted “Peace dividend”?) It can certainly be argued that Clinton and the military did not see eye to eye on the specifics of where cuts should be made, but Clinton never set out to pauperize or destroy the military. (For example, the reduction of ships from 600 to 300 was an extremely wise choice. The “600 ship Navy” had been one of Reagan’s propaganda set pieces and a huge number of obsolescent ships were carried through the '80s and into the '90s in order to preserve that facade. Under Clinton, the Navy was authorized to build the carriers Truman and Reagan, nearly the entire line of Arleigh Burke class destroyers, and almost a third of the Ohio class submarines along with a number of the fast response transports that the Navy had sought–hardly a sign that the Navy was being ignored or reduced without cause.)